PCP3 is the first real program I wrote in C++. First let me give you some history. When I first learned to code (at age 13) I started out in Visual Basic 6. Yeah, yeah, go on, laugh at me :). One of the programs that I wrote (besides joke programs where 'quit' button jumped away from the mouse cursor) was an encryption program that took your plain text and assigned each letter a random number to encode it. The first version (v1.0) was crap and I pretty much started again from scratch as soon as I had finished it. v2.0 was also crap but better than v1.0.

Then I grew up (a bit) and learned C++ (age 14) and decided my first real project was to be a new and awesome version of PCP (hence PCP3 for the v3.0). Basically this version does the same style of thing the first two did, except a hell of a lot better.

 

PCP3 allows you to encode plain text (all 97 characters that are on a standard QWERTY keyboard) into complete gibberish that only the person who you are writing it to can understand.

Here's a scenario for you: Jane and John want to encrypt their email to each other (for god know's what reason :P ) so both install PCP3 and create themselves a user account. They swap 'keys' with each other and now John can write encoded messages to Jane that only Jane can read, and vice versa for Jane. The encoded message they make is saved into a file which they email to each other then decode and read.

 

The sort of encoding that PCP3 does is not 'mathematical' with massive prime numbers and other sort of stuff (like PGP). It is based on random numbers that are mixed with other random numbers and then mixed with some gibberish for good measure. So I don't know how particularly secure it is (I haven't gone and asked the FBI to try and crack it), but I'm quite sure that Jane's friends wouldn't be able to read the dirty encrypted letters she got from John. :D

Try it out the encryption for yourself. Go download it then export your key and import it to yourself and then encrypt yourself a message and open that in Notepad. Good luck at decrypting it. :)

 

PCP3 was a good project for me to learn C++ on. It taught me basic object-oriented development, arrays and creating objects on the stack (you can create as many 'Encode' and 'Decode' windows as you like), interface things (encode and decode windows resize), file IO etc. Of course when I look at the code now, I just about die. I am so much better now! :D

Once I finished the project, I gave it out to my friend, but its use never really took off. Hence, I lost the reason to fix the small bugs in it. Of course, if you decide you want to use it, I will fix those bugs up and release a patch for you (contact me here).

Prepare youself for the biggest joke you've heard all day.

PCP stands for 'Pretty Cool Privacy' which is a spin on the professional encryption software PGP ('Pretty Good Privacy') and the '3' is from the fact that it is version 3.

Shut up and stop laughing at me! :P I made that name up when I was 13, so give me a break! :D My newer programs have better more creative names like 'CDIndexer' or 'FormalTicketer'. You can see I gave up on creative naming :D